John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The WSJ health blog wrote an interesting article a week or so ago that describe the EMR stimulus as “Too Much, Too Soon” Here’s an excerpt of the article:

At issue are the grants available under the stimulus bill to doctors and hospitals showing “meaningful use” of electronic health records. Early signs are that meeting that “meaningful use” standard will be tough, with about 24 requirements by 2011, Politico says. (A final rule is expected this month.)

It’s tough for doctors’ offices and hospitals to fully digitize their operations in that short period, and not clear that early returns on systems allowing such things as digitally transmitted prescriptions or patient access to electronic records will show gains in either costs or quality of care, Politico says. Suggestions include pushing back the deadline or, as one HHS official says, a partial credit system.

One response to "WSJ Says EMR Efforts Get Pushback"

In light of his public remarks this week, Dr. Blumenthal appears to be rather unsympathetic to the industry stakeholder calls for relaxation of both the MU criteria and the compliance timelines. We’ve been moving ahead on the working assumption that the MU Final Rule set (ostensibly to be issued by 6/30) will be essentially the same as the IFR.

Then there’s the EHR Cert the issue resolution, still even further out.